William Maclay

(1737 - 1804)

William Maclay fought in the French and Indian and Revolutionary wars, later serving in the Pennsylvania state legislature in the early 1780s and in the first U.S. Senate under the Constitution, from 1789 to 1791. His journals were first published in 1880 and are now thought to be the only continuous record of the early federal period. In them he notes that George Washington, when asked to take his oath of office as president, “seemed to have forgot half what he was to say, for he made a dead pause and stood for some time, to appearance, in a vacant mood.”